Begginers Guide Needed - How do i get the sources up and running

Hi !First of all, let me say, that i really like the idea of activiti being an open source BPMN2.0 Engine for Human Interactions!

So with a lot of enthusiasm for Open Source and lesser knowlegde, i started to read, try and error…aiming for an environment to get behind the scenes…But after several evenings on research, I'm getting more and more frustrated…

My "activiti in action book" takes 4 weeks to be delivered, and is outdated before it was ordered.

Working examples are hard to find, usually there is a pitfall like - needed commercial JRebel Licenses or - the needed modules in maven are not documented or - dependencies on eclipse are not solved… Deprecations, Warnings, Different MakeTools, Versioncomplications and Errors all along the way…

activiti might be mighty, but where can i find the docs to get this up and running?

alfresco says, it won't support automated ways of Workflow Design, but i cannot affort dozens of Thousand of Euros just to evaluate the maturity of a new technology on a senior consultant level

I thought, Mr. J. Barrez made the right step with his handy Dr. House iPad Example based on activiti-rest and Alfresco, but there is no source telling how to get the activiti-rest Server compiled and how it will talk to the Alfresco Community Server …

When will this technology get out of the shadows of secret societies?

I can offer my spare time to write down a Beginners How To for people like me, but who can help me to get along on this trail?

Camunda forks activiti, Alfresco doesn't integrate the workflow deployment into the alfresco community, This is sad, because this threatens the progress of workflow tools beside the SAP/Scheer world.i believe in open source and the success of activiti in the next years, so please help me to get it up and running!

My "activiti in action book" takes 4 weeks to be delivered, and is outdated before it was ordered.

You can't blame the community for slow delivery of books ;) Nor for adding new features that are not covered in a book that already exists. The book covers the basic concepts of activiti and we try NOT to break backwards-compatibility in our API's so all stuff you read in the book is still valid.

When using activiti as-is, without the need for diving deep into the sources, you can just use out downloadable dstibution (as thousands of users do with every real ease) or use maven and start using it. Our user guide contains a lot of stuff to get you started, including configuring and creating processes. Our javadoc covers the API usage and explorer-app is a good place to see HOW you can use the API to build whatever you want. I agree that some of the "samples" that are/were included in the distro aren't maintained the way they should, but given the bandwidth of the core-dev team we tend to focus on actual product development. As simple getting started is present and can be used without any issues, IMHO.

When it comes to "development" or diving into the source: We use maven as build-tool for all of our modules. It should be sufficient to add those to eclipse (with maven-integration, off course). Dozens of external contributors add pieces of code regularly using pull-requests or build custom extensions based on our sources. We indeed lack a simple guide on "how to get sources build". However, we use maven with a ll inter-module dependencies correct and importing the maven-projects in your IDE should be sufficient to start development. We don't standardize on eclipse but use maven, due to it's wide-spreadnessness (that's no real word, I know ;)) and multi-IDE-support.

When will this technology get out of the shadows of secret societies?

Based on the 20+ post a day in our forum, thousands of monthly downloads and (what we think) open community, I beg to differ it's currently in the shadows of anything.

The fork has no impact on the progress of Activiti, anyone is free to fork activiti and use it in anyway they want. The Alfresco ECM product "uses" activiti as a library to do it's workflow internally and exposes it's own API to talk to workflow, leveraging the BPMN20-format for process deployment and adding integration points that allow processes to work with documents/the repository. The core-dev team are all Alfresco-employees but it's developed independently of the main Alfresco-product. We're involved in all workflow/process related features that are in alfresco (and will be) but still work on Activiti as a separate project. The fact that activiti is not fully exposed in Alfresco has no effect on Activit standalone. In a certain view, Alfresco is just as any other consumer of the Activit API. Free to do with it what they want ;)

I can offer my spare time to write down a Beginners How To for people like me,

That's great! If you've consulted our user guide and javadocs and read the book, but still see gaps where you could contribute, thats something we welcome you to do. We as developers sometimes don't immediately see anything wrong with the documentation we provide and assume knowledge of the frameworks/tools we use (maven, e.g.).

Don't get me wrong, we welcome anyone's opinion on our product and gladly accept any advice, just wanted to give my 2-cents on the statements you provided. In the end, we want all users to enjoy using the product (and many do so right now) in the time we have on our hands.

Any particular issues you currently have in order to get started using/developing on activti?